Accidentally ruining a customer’s favorite garment is one thing; not showing any sympathy or contrition for the
mistake is entirely another.
Mary Keywood knows what it’s like to be behind the front counter of a drycleaning plant face-to-face with
an unhappy customer. Whenever such a situation occurs at her family-owned
cleaners, S. Ray Barrett in Norfolk, VA, she knows exactly what she must do: grin and bear it.
“I would say 90 percent of our customers are really wonderful, but all it takes
is one customer to upset your day,” she said. “When a customer is unhappy about something, I just sort of let them go until
they run out of steam and then look for a solution to the problem. When they
are upset with something when they come in, you have to let it run its course.”
Of course, Mary knows what
it’s like to be on the other side of the counter, as well. In fact, one bad
customer service memory still stands out. Over 20 years ago, one of her
favorite garments was ruined when she took it into a local drycleaning plant.
“It was a white wool coat that I had purchased from a women’s store where you could go in and pick out the material and they would make out
the coat,” she recalled. “I got a teeny dot of coffee with cream and sugar on the coat. It was brand new.
The coat came back from the cleaners with no wool on it. The backing was
showing. They made me pay for the coat. They would not do anything for me.”
At the time, Mary’s husband, Al, was looking to start up a new business. She joked that maybe they
should purchase a drycleaning company so that there would be at least one good
one in the area that actually cared.
Naturally, that is precisely what they did. Not too long afterward, the Keywoods
opted to purchase S. Ray Barrett Cleaners, a business that had been owned and
operated by the same family since its inception in 1909.
Originally, Sam Barrett, Sr., opened his drycleaning operation over an abandoned
tailor shop in an apartment building.
“He paid $3 a week to rent the building and did all the work himself,” noted Al. “Six months later, he starting adding pressers and employees. For lack of a
better description, it was basically just the ‘carriage trade’ type of business. In other words, the elite.”
When the chief mode of transportation changed from the horse and buggy to the
automobile, Sam Barrett, Sr., began to expand the scope of his operations.
“In 1926, he purchased a building on Colonial Avenue Within a short period of
time, he had 45 employees at ten different locations all in the Norfolk area
but the one on Colonial Avenue was the mother ship where all the work was done,” Al added.
Though the company always strived to maintain a high standard of excellence, it
still fell victim to hard times over the years.
“It had dwindled down to two stores when we bought it in 1990, but it still had a
very solid reputation,” Al recalled. “Even then, his prices — as far as the market was concerned — were higher than most.”
Before they bought S. Ray. Barrett Cleaners, Al and Mary discussed which
strategy they wanted to follow: they would either emphasize volume or overall
quality. The decision turned out to be a rather easy one.
“If we had bought a one-priced cleaners, we would have lost money because I’d never stop looking for why something didn’t come out and then it couldn’t be one price,” Mary laughed. “Everything we do is really quality oriented.”
Fortunately for the Keywoods, they had previously embarked on careers that were
suitable primers for owning a drycleaning plant.
By the time the couple bought Barrett, Al had already accrued three decades of
experience in the linen industry.
“My whole life I’ve been around laundry of one sort or another,” he said.
In the late 1980s, Al worked as the corporate vice president for Mohenis
Services, but he was tired of traveling all the time. He wanted to run his own
business and drycleaning seemed like a perfect fit.
Meanwhile, Mary had worked for the government in the Pentagon for ten years
before she was hired full-time by the Xerox Corporation.
Both jobs provided her with a strong background in administrative details,
writing correspondence and policies, working with computers and dealing with
people face-to-face on a daily basis.
“I think every one of my jobs in the government and in Xerox helped prepare me
for the task of running the front end of a business,” she noted.
With Al making sure the clothes were cleaned properly and Mary making sure the
books were in order, business boomed.
In 1993, they relocated the plant to its present location, a 24,000-sq.-ft.
building. They also invested $200,000 in new equipment to help fill up some of
the open space.
While the company thrived over the course of the next eight years, it all
threatened to unravel in 2001 when Al faced a serious health crisis.
“I had a hard time swallowing food. It wouldn’t go down,” he recalled.
After a battery of tests and procedures, Al was diagnosed with esophageal
cancer. Wasting no time, he followed an aggressive treatment that included
radiation and surgery.
“They took his stomach and made an esophagus out of it,” Mary said.
Eventually, Al would be deemed “cancer free,” but during his recovery the family business needed somebody to help pick up the
slack.
Fortunately, Al and Mary’s son, Mike, had worked at the plant since he was 15. At the time, however, he
was currently attending Tidewater college.
“I wasn’t taking it really seriously,” he admitted. “My head wasn’t in it all the way. When my dad got sick, it was the turning point where I
really evaluated what I was doing and I said, ‘I think I’d be of much more help and at more peace of mind with myself if I focussed on
helping the family instead of spinning my wheels.”
Mike was only 21 when he went to work full-time with the company. A few years
later, he became the plant manager in charge of operations and day-to-day
management, a position he still enjoys today.
As with the traditions of the past, quality continues to be the company’s number-one priority. Mike believes that can best be achieved with a highly
experienced staff.
“A lot of cleaners go through pressers on a regular basis,” he said. “They’re constantly hiring and firing. We like to take care of employees because if
they know how things are done around here, that’s less time I have to spend telling new people how to do it our way.”
Sometimes doing things the right way means doing them over and over.
“They all know to send spots back until I come and actually handwrite a card that
says, ‘This is not going to come out’ and I put it on the garment. Otherwise, they are instructed to continually send
spots back to my spotting line. A lot of cleaners kind of put the blinders on
and the pressers press over the spots because they are trying to get it done
and are paid by the piece. That’s not the case here. They’re not paid by the piece here.”
Certainly, the Keywoods have strived hard to foster a friendly familial
atmosphere that extends to all of its staff, many of whom have been employed
with S. Ray Barrett Cleaners for over a decade.
“Just for the heck of it, I added up the combined years of experience earlier,” Mike added. “We have 17 employees, counting the three of us, with 305 years of combined
experience. Most of them have been with us for the majority of the time, but
that number is their total drycleaning experience.”
Barrett Cleaners achieved its Drycleaning and Laundry Institute Award of
Excellence status two years ago and it celebrated the company’s 100th anniversary last August.
The public recognition for such achievements are nice, but the family seems to
enjoy face-to-face encounters with their customers the most. Everybody in the
plant shows a sincere personal interest in the people who regularly drop off
their clothes.
“I think our laundry personnel double as psychiatrists,” Mike laughed.
Mary agreed with the sentiment. In fact, during the night before the interview
she found herself closing the store late with an impromptu evening therapy
session.
“A longtime customer came in and he started talking about retiring and he didn’t know whether or not to move to Charlotte where his daughter was... and he’s tired of his lawn, too. So, I was tired of our lawn and we started talking
about comparing aeration and lime and seeding and mulch and all the prices,” Mary recalled. “By the time he left, he was ready to give up the house today, move to Charlotte
where his daughter was and not have all the upkeep.”
If the conversation eventually results in that customer opting to move away
(taking his garments with him), he will certainly be missed. The Keywoods have
tried to combat the recession by keeping as many customers as possible, but it’s more than that. Mary simply never wants the family cleaners to treat its
clientele as she was treated so many years ago.
“If we ruin somebody’s favorite garment in the plant, we make amends any possible way that is
reasonable,” she explained.
“If that means paying for it or ordering new, we do it,” she said.
